Dream of Fishing Love Poem

Dream of Fishing

ALLAN JOHNSTON

Line in, I see the world as fish might see it—

sweet with moment, movement, the sky curled inside the ominous wheel of dryness. In my realm I watch all made abounce and pragmatic—the film of life

yet to pounce upon the bait. I wait, then strike. Or is it I who hold the line, abated next to the glinting, feathered fly still enticing, entrapping?

I wake from napping.

torky

Love Poem

ALLAN JOHNSTON

Because I pulled pigtails and let friends bite into the spite I had for such loss when the time came, and you, Elsie, with your Germanic plane of chin

back from the prick of forecasting nose leaned in to kiss as the boys held me pinned on the grass in front of Mrs. Winthrop’s house and the curved homeward slope of yard—

bent and kissed on a dare, you did, and then, released, I cared to wipe, curse, and charge my friends into the oblivion of forgetting,

as, years later, the pre-adolescent sex play surfaces—Elsie and Marie, the latter know throughout school as a slut, age of my older brother and into it, boy;

and her sister, smaller, blonde, homelier, maybe after her own, played into the game I thought I was innocent of or naive to, I, lost to such precociousness and all with uneventful oedipal missing not giving in,

yet somehow, secretly, that first kiss still leans on me, remixed and now brought home: blind, fighting desire.

torky

Train Poem

ALLAN JOHNSTON

She reads the Russian news, a story of Giants —is this the baseball team? Events of a fabulous

other time? Movies? Biblical? My skill in piecing out the sounds of Cyrillic script

leave me lost with what I assume to be giant something or other.

Meanwhile,

the train lurches into holding while, staring, I pass without response to anything

that could be offered—boys of the library trysts in evil speculation on monstrous possible truths of the Resurrection buried

in post-deconstruction eclipses. I once read that the train system in Chicago survived the Second World War, at which time

most systems got rebuilt. It might explain the clatter and fragmented aspect

of these cars that creak toward entropy as the system slows and bleeds its seeming

“express” qualities at speeds I could almost walk at. Thus I am come to the system, all the veins

and contours of cities stretched in curves of trends emanating from a center, certain of all

brimming indulgence or business concluded as we ride to the city’s heart.

Originally from southern California, Allan Johnston earned his M.A. in Creative Writing and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals, including Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, Rhino, and New Reader Magazine. He has published two full-length poetry collections (Tasks of Survival, 1996; In a Window, 2018) and three chapbooks (Northport, 2010; Departures, 2013; Contingencies, 2015), and received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Pushcart Prize nomination (2009 and 2016), and First Prize in Poetry in the Outrider Press Literary Anthology competition (2010). His translations and co-translations of poems from the French and German have appeared in Ezra, Metamorphosis, and Transference. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College and DePaul University in Chicago. He reads or has read for Word River, r.kv.r.y, and the Illinois Emerging Poets competition, and is co-editor of JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education. His scholarly articles have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, College Literature, and several other journals.

torky